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September 26 - September 26, 2017
the Marxist revolution has been the precondition that allowed the moral features [of the bourgeois spirit] to come to the surface, while removing the circumstances that could bring about the revolutionary apocalypse. It seems that Marxism, instead of defeating the bourgeois spirit, enabled it to take a step further: viewed in the context of world history, it seems to have been the precondition that allowed the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization to achieve a complete break with the principle of traditional civilizations, in which “every society is aware of its celestial origin
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Interestingly, it is precisely Marxism’s extreme lack of moral scruples that undermines its revolutionary power:
the dialectics of rationalism, understood as negation of the supernatural, starts from an original choice to deny without proof the initial fall.43
if revolution means a radical break with the past, any concession to the idea of the family constitutes the beginning of a reconciliation with tradition.
the “sexual revolution” marks the stage of the bourgeois involution of the revolution.
we can certainly speak of a “Western revolution,” as long as we use the word simply to mean an inversion, from Puritanism to various forms of pan-sexualism.
“Soviet Russia, which owes its existence to a proletarian revolution, is today, in 1944, sex-politically reactionary, while America, with its background of a bourgeois revolution, is at least progressive, sex-politically.”
the break between German critical Marxism and Russian dogmatic Marxism,
it reveals the typical confusion of the Frankfurt school, which regards Platonic purification and the modern idea of scientific-technical domination of nature as stages of the same process.
What presented itself as hope for a total revolution became realized, and today revolutionary and progressive philosophy has the function of legitimizing a more oppressive and, in fact, totalitarian order, regardless of how it disguises itself. But the revolutionary idea started from the negation of the doctrine of original sin, inasmuch as it claimed that it could substitute politics for religion in the liberation of man.
power, not freedom, as the opposite of authority.
Nobody has defined the meaning taken by the word dissolution as well as Guénon.
Today’s reality shows us that the eclipse of authority does not coincide at all with the advent of liberation, but rather with that of power, and totalitarian systems are the tangible expression of this substitution.
However, the habits of the past are so solidified that we still think of totalitarianism as the highest degree of authority.
The widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.
the materialism of the present banishes all absolutes, and thus all forms of verticalism.
an advocate of scientism, and a society based on his way of thinking, cannot help being totalitarian inasmuch as his conception of science – as exclusive of every other form of knowledge and, thus, of various aspects of reality that are declared to be either unknowable or non-existing – cannot be the object of any proof. Indeed, a scientistic thinker does not intend to elevate other forms of thought to a higher level (which is the attitude, for instance, of secular liberalism75 toward religion), but he simply “denies them.”
As all higher values collapse, scientistic anti-traditionalism can be represented only by large-scale economic-bureaucratic organizations.
The essential element of totalitarianism, in brief, lies in the refusal to recognize the difference between “brute reality” and “human reality,” so that it becomes possible to describe man, non-metaphorically, as a “raw material” or as a form of “capital.” Today this view, which used to be typical of Communist totalitarianism, has been taken up by its Western alternative, the technological society.
In every totalitarian system, what starts as persecution of religion mutates into persecution of reason.
what is pure power, when it is not subordinated to morals? Force.
morality is founded on theology.
The idea of happiness that has become dominant since the eighteenth century is completely different from the traditional idea of “beatitude,” which indicates a correct relationship with being
It is now clear how the process of criticism of authority, which originally was directed against conservatism, against false consciousness, against mystification, etc., ends up reaching the greatest degree of conservatism and linguistic falsification ever known in history.
“Teilhard is the culmination of bourgeois thought, pliable but absorbent.
freedom without authority ends in anarchy, and authority without freedom in despotism.93
the habit of setting in opposition primacy of freedom (West, progress, modernity, dynamic and innovative spirit, etc.) and primacy of authority (East, Middle Ages, despotism, past, immobility, etc.) dates back to that time. This habit still survives, and in the most dangerous form because it keeps shaping the standard ethico-political and historical judgments, even if their first premises are seldom recalled and made the object of a rigorous critical examination.
The complete absorption of morality into politics – which leads to persecutions, terror, and, ultimately, the selfishness of a new ruling class, which is the endpoint of all revolutions – could never be achieved without the utopian component, which promises that humanity will reach peace, happiness, and security after such turmoil.
No historical period has verified Proudhon’s famous line “at the bottom of politics there is always theology”6 as well as ours.
The power word of contemporary intellectuals is “demythologization”: in their view, social progress will go hand in hand with the progress of demythologization and will be shaped by it, in terms of both ideas and morals. This is the faith of progressive intellectuals, and in this respect secular and Catholic intellectuals are indistinguishable.
If Being is not affirmed as an order of values, it is pushed into the realm of dreams; being formless, it is confused with the impossible delights of a lost world or an imaginary world.13
Because of the culture that inspires it, the technocratic right is mortally opposed to traditional thought as I briefly defined it earlier. In fact, the alliance between technocratic right and cultural left is there for everyone to see.
According to the Slavophiles, this salvation of the world was supposed to come from Russian Christianity. Lenin succeeded by taking up the same idea but with the opposite sign.
Perhaps this is also the ultimate explanation of the massacre of the imperial family: Lenin had to erase every trace of Tsarism because he was taking up the task assigned to it by the Slavophiles.
those who want to act need theory more than those who only want to think.”
Marxism succeeded in denying that values are absolute, and the nihilism that dominates the Western world reflects this “success-failure” of Marxism.
today nihilism is no longer the tragic nihilism of Nietzsche or, in part, of Dostoevsky; it is “accepted” nihilism, so to speak.
Today Islam, surprisingly in its most traditionalist version, seems to be the only worldwide force capable of mobilizing young people, to the point of pushing them to the slaughter, to the front line.
I would say that secular ideas, both liberal and Marxist, are what kept me in it. Since I was born Catholic, I would have needed some “reasons” to leave, but these reasons, proposed by many sides, never convinced me.
secularization ended up meaning above all the realization of God’s kingdom in the political and social world;
Pelagius’s ghost has already been evoked (for example by Leo Moulin15) as a prefiguration of the ideology and the sensibilities of the left: of its very strong sense of human power and freedom and of its Promethean trust in man’s future capabilities; so much so that one may think that the left’s criticism of inheritance is itself an aspect of the rejection of Augustine’s inheritance of sin.
Secularization lets Pelagius win over Saint Augustine, but on terms that Pelagius could not have accepted.
“Any theological interpretation that reduces Christology to anthropology, God’s love to man’s love, charity to morality, that empties the cross regarding it as a myth, an analogy, a symbol, that reduces the pair love-death to a literary model, is the negation of Christianity.”18
In Communism, however, a trace of the messianic aspect remains, even if it is confined more and more to the background. This trace is what is erased by Western libertarianism, which in this way is able to create the most complete vacuum of any dependence on the values of the past. What is left, if not a human being disconnected from the past and without hope for the future, deprived of a community based on values, so that we can speak, as a general form, of an individual without a person?
We seem to be moving toward the victory of a physicalist-scientistic-technological culture, to which corresponds a form of morality that reverses Kant’s imperative and thus sounds like “think of what is human in yourself and in others as a means, not as an end.”
Our world is marked by the greatest development both of science and technology and also of the mythical spirit, a contradiction which is only apparent: Nazism’s unity of fanaticism and technology goes to show that there is no contradiction.
starting from anti-Fascism the progressives rediscover the Enlightenment.
distinction between anti-Fascism and Resistance,
Antifa & The Resistance
Aversion against the traditional spirit has never been so strong and widespread, and reverence for the “so-called” eternal values has never been mocked so much, reaching the highest degree of desecration. But what have been the results? Empirical observation casts doubt on the efficacy of the cure, so that even radical intellectuals become perplexed. As I get ready to write these pages, I am reading a column by a radical writer in an Italian newspaper about the “escalation,” the faster and faster pace of the “taste for violence,” for destruction, for erotic perversion, for the exaltation of
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why does one lie? Obviously in order to possess other people, not to persuade them.
